In the battle for the wallets of footballs fans who visited the Bay Area for Super Bowl 50, San Francisco, as expected, walloped San Jose and Santa Clara.

The big game provided a $240 million boost to the Bay Area economy, but the South Bay, home to Levi”s Field, only snared about 20 percent of the economic benefit, according to findings released Monday by the host committee.

San Francisco, which hosted the weeklong Super Bowl extravaganza and put up most of the fans in its plentiful hotels, benefitted from 57 percent of Super Bowl related economic activity. The remainder was spread around the Bay Area with cities near San Francisco International Airport accounting for 7 percent and Oakland nearly 4 percent.

The economic implications of hosting the massive sporting event loomed over the region as politicians in San Francisco chafed at paying millions in police overtime and other costs associated with the weeklong celebration and San Jose hotel operators found themselves with far more vacancies than anticipated in the week leading up to the big game.

The host committee on Monday only released an abridged version of its report, which showed a fairly modest economic impact compared to other recent Super Bowls. However, committee leaders said that is because they insisted on using a conservative methodology that took into account spending that would have taken place without the Super Bowl as well as lost business caused by hosting the game.

“We wanted to make sure our numbers were solid, even at the risk of underestimating,” Super Bowl 50 Host Committee CEO Keith Bruce said in a prepared statement. “Even through this very conservative lens, it”s clear that Super Bowl 50 was an economic boon for the Bay Area.”

Sports economists have often accused host committees of inflating the economic benefit of hosting the Super Bowl. A report commissioned by the committee that brought 2015”s big game to Glendale, Arizona, found that it gave a whopping $719 million economic boost to the Phoenix area.

The $240 million figure might still be inflated, but the report appears to be one of the more honest portraits of the economic value of hosting a major sporting event said Victor Matheson, a sports economist at the College of the Holy Cross, who studies the economics of Super Bowls.

“I don”t know if they did it right but at least this is a group that is cognizant where you can go wrong and is not just trying to give you the biggest number possible,” he said.

Matheson said it was no surprise that San Francisco reaped most of the economic benefit since hotel rooms are typically biggest economic driver from Super Bowls. “If you”re a rich tourist coming in for four or five days around the Super Bowl you”re not staying in San Jose,” he said.

The relatively modest economic boost associated with the Bay Area”s Super Bowl stems from the host committee”s insistence on separating money spent during the event and surrounding festivities with money spent because of them, said Dr. Patrick Rishe, CEO of Sportsimpacts, the economics firm that performed the study.

Rishe, who also is the director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis, factored in lost economic activity from locals leaving the region and tourists and business conference operators choosing to avoid the Bay Area during Super Bowl week.

He also excluded spending by Bay Area residents during the week, assuming that they would have spent their money elsewhere in the region.

While private spending provides a boost to the local economy, it doesn”t” guarantee that host cities come out in the black. A report by the San Francisco Controller”s Office in May found that the city made about $2 million from the Super Bowl. A San Jose report in March noted that hotel tax revenues had fallen below expectations. The city had already allocated money to pay for increased police costs of helping host Super Bowl festivities.

Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435. Follow him on Twitter at Matthew_Artz.